


Round Deer Ears

by FrillyPinkUmbrella



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Canon Universe, Dry Humping, First Kiss, First Time, First War with Voldemort, Getting Together, M/M, Mutual Pining, Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter), Pining, Slow Burn, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:08:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28936056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrillyPinkUmbrella/pseuds/FrillyPinkUmbrella
Summary: ***James shields himself from the vial with a weak hand. “I’m not drinking the thing again.”He looks miserable, a strand of hair sticking out in exceptional prominence.Sirius gets a sudden urge to kiss him.“This ‘thing,’” he says, “is fucking expensive.”“Yeah? Remus didn’t give you a friends discount?”***Mwah. Yes, I'm back at it.Getting together! Fluff! Smut! Post-Hogwarts! All of your favorite tags in a box and wrapped with a ribbon.
Relationships: Sirius Black/James Potter
Comments: 24
Kudos: 68





	1. Of Poisons, Potions, and Potentially Disastrous Activities

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there!
> 
> So excited to be back.
> 
> A few things to make clear before we start this chapter:
> 
> 1\. Set a year or two after Hogwarts
> 
> 2\. James and Sirius are rooming together in a flat. (Don't care which city - London, Manchester, Tokyo or whatever, they can apparate everywhere anyway. Take your pick.)
> 
> 3\. They don't have the two-way mirrors in this timeline. It was just... more convenient this way, OK? More dramatic and everything. I know you like it delicious oh my!

**Of Poisons, Potions, and Potentially Disastrous Activities**

The moment he heard the news that James got injured, Sirius’s first thought was, _yes, and?_ Then he remembered that none of the previous times James got injured was Sirius _informed_ about it. So the reasoning went as follows: 

1\. If he didn’t get informed every time James got injured;

2\. If the Order sent a fucking _Patronus_ to tell Sirius this time around;

3\. Then, it must be quite an injury. 

The Patronus had popped up between a couple of hedges that surrounded Malfoy Manor, right when Sirius was leaving from the day’s espionage shift. He had been walking swiftly, starving and eager to go home, shivering beneath James’s Invisibility Cloak. 

Silver strings swirl around the wolf Patronus like an animated cocoon. 

“Who was it?” Sirius shouts at it. 

“Voldemort’s snake,” says a deep, liquid version of Remus’s voice.

The wind howls. 

“What, _Nagini?”_

“Oh, that thing has a name?”

Nagini’s fangs were venomous, because obviously. The poison made you bleed out in rivers, which could only be stopped by an immediate dose of blood-replenishing potion. 

Sirius tries to glare at the wolf, but when he pries his eyes open for more than a sliver, a gazillion snowflakes wedge into the vulnerable space. 

“Of course it has a name; it’s a _pet,”_ he croaks, trying to work his voice properly. “You’re sure he’s alright?”

The wolf nods, turning back into the frigid dark.“You better go check on him, though–I bet Lily’s exhausted…”

“Where is he?”

“Home…” The retreating wolf fades into a gray silhouette.

“What, not even the _hospital?”_

James lies sprawled atop the covers, a leg loosely hinged over the edge and another propped up. He lifts his head, greets Sirius with a slow blink, and drops back on the pillow. 

“Alright?” Sirius says. He makes himself sound casual, since James hates it so much when Sirius goes all wary. Sirius hates it, too, to be honest. It’s all manly and tough between them.

“ _Nuuuurrrggh,”_ James groans. 

Right, not so manly, then.

Sirius drops to the seat beside the bed. It’s one of the chairs from the kitchen; Lily must have brought it.

“Where’s Evans?”

“Meerrrngh!”

“Quit it. You sound like the Squid.”

“Went home.”

“You mean you told her to go home?”

“I _asked_ her if she wanted to.”

“You told her. You definitely told her,” Sirius says, matter-of-factly. 

James grunts, feigning sleep. 

He seems to have stopped pining after Lily Evans for a while, now. In fact, he had put a stop to pining, period. Because of the war, probably—not that the war has made Sirius shed any of _his_ inconvenient feelings. It’s been a small blessing, though, that Sirius doesn’t have to lend any more ears to anecdotes of “she said this,” “then I made this _terrific_ joke, Padfoot,” and “but her _hair_ …” Playing audience to Prongs’ droning love encounters on top of every other bullshit in Sirius’s current life would have made anyone rip off the Invisibility Cloak at the next available shift and turn themselves in to the Death Eaters.

Sirius leans in to observe the wound. Or rather, the bandages. James is naked from the waist up and the left side of his stomach is covered in bandages. Blood blossoms across the fabric like a sloppy tie-dye. A little skin shows between the bottom of it and the beginning of James’s trousers; Sirius brushes it with a thumb. 

James shifts on the sheets. 

“You need to change these,” Sirius says, gesturing to the bandages. Not that James can see. He’s got his eyes closed.

“Lily already did.”

“Did she, now.”

Sirius makes sure he’s got a perfectly straight face when James opens his eyes. 

Huge orbs, the color of amber. Mahogany. The fireplace in the Gryffindor common room. 

“It’s still bleeding,” Sirius points out.

James huffs as Sirius tugs on a loose end of a bandage, already set to work. He peels off a stripe, hears James’s feet shuffle around, and decides to be more careful. He peels off another, much slower. The sight underneath makes him fight down the things digesting in his stomach, and he’s seen plenty of injuries. Plenty on himself and on James. 

Two gaping holes punctuate the skin, deep enough that light doesn’t reach inside, as though James was just another scrap of paper a giant stapler had to pinch through. Drops of blood trickle out of each opening; Sirius fumbles for a handkerchief and presses it firmly to the wound, but some blood beads out anyway and seeps into the sheets. James squirms. 

“I got bitten by a snake,” he grits out, a smirk hidden in his voice. “I got bitten by a venomous snake, Padfoot, that’s fucking _cool_.”

“That’s fucking stupid,” Sirius corrects.

“Not just _any_ snake —“ James giggles, but it sounds dry, like he’s in the middle of a gasp. “ _Voldemort’s_ snake itself!”

“It’s dumb luck that you survived.” Sirius struggles to reach for the fresh roll of bandages sitting on the drawer, while hanging on to the handkerchief by the elbow. “If Moony hadn’t been carrying that potion…” In his exertion Sirius realizes he’d started the sentence without thinking it through.

James is silent for a while, his hands stuck underneath his head. Sirius wonders if maybe even James gets scared of death from time to time. “Count on Moony to carry around the weirdest potions in a battle…”

“He has them for the full moons,” Sirius says, smoothing over the last of the bandage. “And I’m bringing more of it—seems like you could do with another dose.” He doesn’t want another ugly tie-dye.

“It’s disgusting,” James moans. “You should try it too.”

Just like James, to call something that saved his skin disgusting. Sirius decides to ignore him.

“Count your lucky stars, J. And the moons, for Moony’s sake. Honestly… a fucking snake…” He stands up, about to leave. Something catches his wrist.

James is biting his lip, his grip tightening painfully. His eyes are paralyzed onto Sirius’s, round as though he’s mistaken Sirius for a ghost.

“James?”

All of a sudden, James averts his eyes and loosens his grip, slides his palm down, and slips his fingers through Sirius’s dumbfounded ones. 

Before Sirius can come back to earth, James has let go.

“James,” Sirius says, keeping the quiver out of his voice. He’s gaping down at his own hand, which James had just held. He tries closing his fist — it itches, and he double-checks that there’s nothing there. 

“I’m just fetching the potion,” he says.

“I know.” James doesn’t meet his eyes. His hand is back to its default spot under his head. His plump bottom lip has escaped his teeth, but a faint red line still shows through. Sirius thinks James’s teeth can have a venom of its own. A venom of false hope and endless longing and a kind of pain that no snake would be able to pull off. 

By the time Sirius has brought the potion back, it’s as if nothing out of the ordinary had traversed between them. James narrates the day’s battle, although tonight’s show is (gracelessly) restricted to just his arms given unforeseen circumstances. 

“Then I see the snake _,_ and I’m about to _kill it,_ just like that—“ James grabs the nearest wand, which happens to be Sirius’s, and bears it like a knife. He dodges around the vial that Sirius pushes into his face.

“You’re not supposed to kill snakes, J, you _run away_ from itlike your life depends on it—“ He holds the vial close again.

James steers clear. “Oh, quit it, you pureblood royal, you’re fucking _family_ is a bunch of Slytherins—“

“Which is why I ran for it, right?” Sirius bewitches the potion so it can chase James’s mouth on its own without him having to do the work. 

“Forget it—I’m willing to _bet_ that Nagaga snake is some kind of soulmate of Voldemort, it’s like—”

“You’re making the arguable assumption there that our fellow bloke has a soul to start off,” Sirius points out. “And really, James. _Nagaga?_ ”

James shields himself from the vial with a weak hand. “I’m not drinking the thing _again.”_

He looks miserable, a strand of hair sticking out in exceptional prominence. 

Sirius gets a sudden urge to kiss him.

“This ‘ _thing,’_ ” he says, “is fucking expensive.” 

“Yeah? Remus didn’t give you a friends discount?”

“Prongs, come off it.” 

James finally submits when the vial starts to attack his chin. He takes it in his hand, coming up with a different ugly face with each sip and an illustrative new take of Mermish. 

Sirius leans back in his seat and yawns. “So. You think you can look after yourself for a while?”

James blinks. “What, you leaving?” he gurgles.

“Tomorrow, early morning. Remus can drop by once in a while.“

“When are you coming back?”

“I dunno. Dumbledore said a month, give or take—”

“A month?!” James yelps and sprays the potion everywhere, which happens to include Sirius. “A month?!”

“Shit, James.” The potion smells of rust and stains yellow in Sirius’s shirt. “ _Yes,_ a month… It’s just ordinary spying, you know, going through the stuff at the Manor…there’s a particular wardrobe in there somewhere that Dumbledore’s concerned about…”

“If you’re just spying, why a _month_?”

“The Manor is putting on new protective enchantments tomorrow at noon. I can’t just scamper through the gates without losing my cover now. I’ve got to finish what work there’s left or I’ll never be able to go back again.” 

James’s head sinks further into his pillow, snaggy hair falling over his cheeks and his increasingly furrowing forehead.

Sirius wants to leave the room before the temper tantrum begins. He guesses he has about two and a half seconds. 

“Look, you can take the Cloak to your missions. I’m Disillusioning from now on.”

And Sirius promptly takes off, shutting the door behind him. 

“WHY AREN’T YOU TAKING THE CLOAK!”

Sirius sighs, because he’s hungry and exhausted and James really can be _loud_ even through a closed door, and he finds only a couple cans of soup and bare wheat bread in the pantry. He takes them out.

“SINCE WHEN HAVE YOU DISILLUSIONED—YOU’VE ALWAYS USED THE CLOAK!”

“Got some practice in last night.”

“LAST NIGHT!” 

Sirius pictures James clambering up from his bed and storming toward the door. He cuts the can faster, fully intending to finish before James has bled himself to death.

“It’s easy once you’ve gotten the hang of it.”

“YOU’RE REALLY GONNA LIVE AS A PATHETIC CHAMELEON FOR A MONTH? TAKE THE FUCKING CLOAK!”

Sirius mutters a quick heating spell, grabs the loaf of bread, and heads back to James’s room. 

He bangs open the door and cringes at the sight of James sitting fully erect on the bed with a fist in his hair, fresh blood happily zooming across the covers. He has to abandon his dinner on the floor in order to rummage under the drawer for clean bandages.

“SIRIUS!”

Sirius winces. “James, _yes,_ I’m really going to live as a pathetic chameleon for a month. The Cloak is a lot more dangerous; someone can so much as step over it and blow my cover —“

“The Cloak repels curses!”

“Exactly, and what happens when someone’s curse bounces off me? They’ll know something funny is up, eh? James, please,” Sirius prods his shoulder when he doesn’t budge. “Lie down before you lose all your blood.”

“Take the cloak,” James hiccups. Sirius looks up in alarm, only to see that James has started to cry, the fist that’s not in his own hair closing around Sirius’s collar. James barely ever cries. “Take the cloak…You don’t have to use it, just _take_ it…”

“Jamie” — Sirius only ever uses that name in special occasions — “What are you bawling over? You really don’t trust my charmwork, do you?”

James sniffles.

“My Disillusionment works great, and it’s your Cloak anyway—you use it on your missions too…”

“It’s not _my_ Cloak… it’s ours.”

“OK, whatever you say—”

“It’s _yours.”_

“OK,” says Sirius dumbly.

James plays with his collar. His fingers brush his neck at times, making Sirius shiver and immediately force himself to hide his shivering before James can notice and stop. James’s eyes don’t quite reach his, fixed on an indiscernible point located around Sirius’s middle and briefly flitting up toward somewhere on his chin before gazing back down, as if suddenly nervous of Sirius’s face. 

The thought hurts _._

“James, will you please lie down? You’re bleeding like mad over here.”

“I didn’t want to die,” James blurts out.

“Huh?” 

James’s eyes are squeezed shut, the part between them creasing. His complexion has lost some of its sunny copper sheen, but Sirius attributes it to the rapidly decreasing blood level, and he promptly remembers that James really has to lie down. “Me, too, Prongs, I’m glad you didn’t die, OK, now _lie down_ —“

This time, when Sirius pushes, James gives easily, sinking back into the sheets. But he takes Sirius with him, the hand on his collar tugging with a surprising force, considering he has about a quarter of blood left inside.

“I didn’t want to die… today… not before…” James eyes flutter open, slowly observing the sight of Sirius’s alarmed face mere inches from him. His gaze flits to the area around Sirius’s lips, and Sirius’s brain ignites and short-circuits; he struggles to come up with a single explanation for James’s behavior that’s semi-plausible…

“Prongs.” Sirius’s elbows settle into the pillow, caging James in. His head spins, and he silently wishes for a glass of water. “You realize what this means?”

Warm brown eyes blink up, lips parting in not necessarily desire, but something far beyond it, like curiosity. Awe. 

His hand releases Sirius’s collar and travels up to his jaw, skimming every bit of skin on the way. His palm feels clammy and unpleasant, yet no single insult comes out of Sirius’s mouth. 

James lifts his head — their foreheads touch, then the tips of their noses — Sirius moves across the last breath of space between them and braces himself for what smells like bliss but would more likely be disaster. 

The kiss is less a demand, more a question.

The swipe of tongue on Sirius’s lips, whispering, _Sirius?_ andSirius doing the same.

— _James?_

_— Can we keep going?_

_— Do you want to?_

_— Will you let me?_

James lowers himself down, licking over his lips with a contemplative look to his eyes. He tips his chin up to swallow, and his throat bobs in clear view. Sirius’s make-believe dialogue fades out. 

“When the snake…,” James starts, “…and I was bleeding, and I thought I was dying, I didn’t feel anything that wasn’t regret that I couldn’t…with you…you know. We don’t have to do it again…” 

Sirius tilts his head. _Yes-let’s-do-it-again, but I won’t say that to you, yet, because it could scare you off and spell the end of our eight-year friendship that also happens to be the only real friendship I have_.

“I just had to know,” James admits. “What it was like.”

“How was it like?”

Sirius knows he’s a good kisser, and he’s skilled in sex and seduction and generally everything belonging in the area — even when he doesn’t give a flying fuck about the other person. 

But James doesn’t answer his question; in fact he looks like he’s completely lost interest in it, entertaining himself by twiddling with Sirius’s tie, and Sirius suddenly remembers that this is _James_ and that he really does happen to give a flying fuck or two about this particular bighead. 

But James had never been quick to submit to power, even if it came from Sirius…

It’s quite obvious that he _is_ submitting, just not yet able to admit to it. 

Sirius pinches the bridge of his glasses and takes them off. 

Sirius’s tie tugs in James’s palm and he’s again pulled down —he hasn’t quite forgotten about the bleeding, though, and he can feel hot liquid already soaking through the knee of his pants. Between kisses he fumbles around for the potion, swinging his arm this way and that and sweeping his fingers across the floor… _but it was just there…_

“Focus on _me_.” James tugs on his hair. 

_So this is what James does to himself all the time,_ Sirius thinks. Frankly, it hurts. It also makes his heart blow up.

“First things first,” Sirius says, now able to use his vision to locate the potion.“Aha.” 

James is silent. Perhaps he is finished with the long list of synonyms for “it’s disgusting,” English or otherwise, or perhaps he’s finally beginning to feel the alarming effects of blood loss. His face has sprouted a faint bluish tint — if Sirius kissed him now it would be like kissing a corpse. 

“Here.” Sirius holds out the vial, wondering how many more times he will have to do this just in one night and whether James can learn how to drink things by himself. But since it is an available opportunity to touch him, he takes it. His hand hugs the back of his head and catches onto the thousand snags; he gently lifts it up and watches as James takes a sip.

A drop escapes from the corner of his lips. Sirius licks it off immediately, without thinking. 

James smirks. “So? What’s the House Chef’s evaluation?”

“Gross,” Sirius says bluntly. The blood-replenishing potion tastes exactly like blood.

James does it again anyway, this time purposefully. He takes a slow slip, parts his lips, and lets a full stream trickle down his chin and drip onto his collarbone. Sirius picks up each droplet like marbles. 

James gives a quiet moan. His face slowly regains color, returning to the smooth copper tan that Sirius had until very recently only dreamed of caressing. He touches it now, underneath his fingers, the faint freckles and the way the nose scrunches up in faux-annoyance—and the _eyelashes._ James’s eyelashes are as fluttery and rich as if he hadn’t shed a single one since the day he was born, and Sirius had vowed to himself in fifth-year that he would protect them at all costs. Now he can put it into words.

“Your eyelashes, Jamie.”

The objects in mention blink. 

“What about them?”

James sounds tense; his breath shakes slightly as Sirius’s mouth moves on to his temple and then the part behind his ear, to the bridge of his nose where red marks stamp themselves from his stupid glasses. James squirms and tips his chin, pouting when he realizes Sirius won’t kiss his mouth for a while now. His hands slide up and down Sirius’s front, slowly at first like he’s trying to be sexy. He gives up by the time Sirius has reached the underside of his jaw; his hands are full-on rubbing, and Sirius’s stomach clenches and moves with them. 

Then James’s hips push up.

_Oh._

Sirius grits his teeth.

James pushes again, this time slightly harder as if assuming Sirius didn’t quite catch itthe first time. His lips curl then pop open into a small _o,_ his fingers grappling at Sirius’s back. 

“You’re _injured,”_ says Sirius.

“You’re _leaving_ ,” says James. “ _Tomorrow._ ”

 _Tomorrow_ suddenly sounds too soon, especially when James says it that way, like it’s Sirius’s fault that the war is brewing and that he’s skipping from mission to mission and that he and James have _just_ started doing whatever it is they’re doing—hooking up? Dating? Channeling frustration?—the night before “tomorrow.”

So Sirius goes on with it, for once not bothering to check if James has stopped bleeding, and wedges a thigh into the space between James’s legs. James starts to use it immediately, hands latching onto Sirius’s back and the gap between his lips widening with his every new hump.

“Mmph,” James’s voice hitches, hands lowering onto his own belt, “Siri _us.”_

Sirius takes over, batting James’s hands away to undo his belt himself. James squirms when Sirius rubs him through his boxers, catching Sirius’s every kiss a little belatedly with a quiet moan and a tight knit in his brows. Sirius curls over him and starts to hump his leg, steering clear of his injury, and James hiccups, latching onto Sirius’s hip with a bent leg and scrabbling to get Sirius’s shirt off. Sirius helps him unbutton it all the way.

James keens and his pupils blow up, hands running all over him and indiscriminately over his nipples — Sirius humps harder. His palms squeeze James’s arse, bringing it closer, tighter against himself…

“ _Nguuuh!_ ” James moans.

After Sirius has started to properly touch him, without the boxers or the teasing, everything quickly follows. The way James comes is all Sirius imagined and none of it at the same time: His head thrown back, neck laid bare to the elements—and Sirius’s nose promptly buries into it. Sirius’s fantasies for one had never quite managed to produce the tangy masculine smell of James’s sweat or the way his fist shakes weakly around the bunched-up, blood-spotted sheets. 

Sirius comes just from humping him. The pulling on his hair had helped matters, especially combined with James’s Little Noises. He steadies his breath and hovers over James, still stirring up the strength to move away.

“You have to let me know,” whispers James into his shoulder. “That you’re safe. Every day.”

“Sure I will.”

“ _Promise.”_

Sirius doesn’t promise and James understands; there may have been a time when James would sob and beg for promises, but he’s realized by now that any promise Sirius could utter would be empty. And he'd take no promises at all rather than empty ones.

So Sirius holds him tighter. If he had been successful in putting up the facade of a friends-with-benefits hook-up with James up until now, this was the moment he let it go — he kisses James’s earlobe far after the orgasm has ended, physical desire having retreated into its shallow purls. He kisses his cheek, hands locking his jaw in place. He kisses his lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am finished with most of the fic and am in the process of polishing it.  
> Next chapter will be up in the next couple of days.
> 
> Until then!


	2. Of Quests, Quick-Quotes, and Quality Souvenirs

**Of Quests, Quick-Quotes, and Quality Souvenirs**

Sirius slips out of bed before dawn, careful not to wake James up — he couldn’t imagine himself being brave enough to leave amidst his brewing, four-AM world-weariness if James were to say one final, “Are you _really_ going?”

But he does take one last look at James, letting himself mould over the previous night’s encounters…Presently, James scrunches up the sheets around where Sirius had been sleeping, muttering something in his dream, his mouth falling open…Sirius’s heart takes off at the sight. He thinks this image alone can fuel him for at least a week, hopefully a month.

Malfoy Manor, headquarters of all evil, can also be quiet in the early morning. Sirius supposes even the filthiest Death Eaters mutter in their sleep at four AM, and he’s filled up with a strange urge not to invade their camp. At least not now.

He sits in the grass, shadowed by the hedges, stretches out his legs and yawns.

“You should probably Disillusion, you know.”

Sirius jerks — already, he regrets pardoning the Death Eaters the small mercy. He should probably Disillusion, yes, right now.

But it’s Remus who shows himself in the weak moonlight.

“Merlin,” Sirius breathes out, regaining control of his heart rate. “What are you doing here, Moony?”

“Hi, Sirius.” Remus sits down beside him, gruff like he hasn’t had his daily cup of tea yet. “I’m your messenger. Any findings or odd behavior you’re to report to me.”

“And you’re going to—?”

“Send them along to the Order, of course.”

“Wonderful,” says Sirius, clapping Remus’s shoulder. “While you’re at it, you can be my private messenger, too.”

“Which would entail…?”

“Prongs.”

“Of course.”

They are quiet for a while. Sirius is perfectly content listening to the early birds chirp and wake up the world, singing in this perfectly mundane sort of way that lets him be transported to a wood of sorts, where Malfoys and magic don’t exist. He almost groans when Remus breaks the silence and does so with a topic that, of all available topics, happens to be the one Sirius wishes to avoid.

“You really fell for him, didn’t you.”

“Shut it. I’m not in the mood.”

“So, has anything happened between you yet, or…?” Just like Remus, to push when asked not to push. He doesn’t give a shit about other people’s _moods,_ Remus doesn’t. He doesn’t _understand_ moods, at least not of normal humans, since the only mood swings he gets are from the lunar cycle. You’d think having a werewolf as a best mate would make you develop some pity over the years, but more dryness and indifference than the average emotive person on his part made it really hard to do that.

“Yes,” Sirius sighs. Last night seems far away; it may as well have been a dream. Except Sirius doesn’t dream good dreams. “No. I don’t know.”

“You mean something happened but you don’t know what it meant?”

“Excellent, Moons. I knew I should have put it exactly that way.” Sirius fakes a yawn. He then sits up and performs his favorite impersonation of Flitwick, throat hitching up an octave: “ _Marvelous!_ ”

If Remus saw the attempt at diverting his attention, he doesn’t buy it. His face pinches up. “Be careful, Sirius.”

“Huh?”

“This is _James_ we’re talking about.”

“Oh,” Sirius says, popping out his dramatic eyes. “I did figure it wasn’t Snivellus.”

“James is your…”

Indeed, even Remus seems to struggle for a word to describe exactly what James _is_ to Sirius: God knows _Sirius_ has tried. At least if James was reducible to one word, one dictionary definition, Sirius would know what to _do_ with him, how to think about him. But James was more than a best mate, more than a teenage crush, he was all-encompassing, he flew and ran and raced with Sirius, turned the most excruciatingly tedious detentions, summers stuck at home, and NEWTs revisions into his most vivid memories to date _,_ he fought alongside him as well as against him at times, he spat unspeakable insults at him in his quite occasional fits, he provoked him, he set him on fire, he hung on to him like there was nobody else in the world quite like him.

“You can’t just lose him over a fling,” Remus summarizes helplessly.

“It doesn’t matter. If it’s a fling, fine. We won’t stop being mates because of it,” Sirius puckers his lips, like he’s training to catch a pencil on the part below his nose. 

“If you say so,” says Remus skeptically.

“I do. And by the way, don’t go sticking your nose everywhere.”

“ _Everywhere?_ This is hardly ‘everywhere,’ Sirius. This is _you and James._ ”

Sirius jerks his head, but nods properly in his mind. If he loses James, he also loses Remus. He _has_ to stay with James, even if James breaks his heart and falls in love with someone else without a backward glance — likely someone who looks and acts like Lily Evans — and promptly moves out of the sweat-reeking hog hole that they call their flat. He has to, because one, he will go insane if he didn’t, and two, because Remus also depends on them.

It’s like Remus thrives on the closeness between the two; it would be like gravity itself fell in two if James and Sirius did. Who would accompany Remus on the full moons from then on? Would they take turns, Sirius taking the odd month and James the even? Or would they, as animals, forego human complexities for just one night in a month and yap at each other like nothing ever came between them, the one night for which every other one of Sirius’s nights will lead up to, dream to, live just for the sake of it to? Or would they abandon Remus altogether, trusting that Peter would at least be there? Peter seemed to be drifting off these days.

It really is just them three. And two of them presently huddle close at the break of dawn, not quite ready to face the sun, regarding it side-by-side as it rises anyway.

Thirty more suns, give or take. That’s what Dumbledore had said. Thirty more suns and he’ll see James again. Sirius realizes he’s looking forward to it, even while acknowledging that everything might after all end up in shattered little feelings. Of course he’s looking forward to it. He always looks forward to James.

The Manor is dingy and smells of moss. Sirius wonders how this could be when the entire structure is made of cold-hard marble. Disillusioned down to the fingertip, he struggles to scurry across the entrance hall without the soles of his feet making a single noise, regretting that he’d worn shoes at all.

No one was going to see him; there was no point in being anything that wasn’t full-on naked.

He spends the first couple of hours dodging the yawning, bathrobed Malfoys and hunting for what will be his hideout for the coming month. He lands in a spacey broom cupboard pretty early on and almost settles in it — that is, until he finds masks stacked up against the corner. Shining-metal Death-Eater masks, complete with a unique engraving for each. He doesn’t risk setting up camp inside, seeing that he has nowhere to dodge when someone decides to retrieve their mask and go torture someone. But he does nick one of them — a neat pattern of stalks that trail down from the eye-slits, like pretty tears, with the name _Narcissa Malfoy_ chiseled onto the sharp edge.

The next place he finds is an abandoned bedroom. At first, he doesn’t see anything wrong with it — he pats the bed and dust flies everywhere, so he reckons no one’s come in here for years. Then something catches his attention: two tiny sculptures of cobras on the edges of the headboard, carved in extreme attention to detail (Sirius will give them that), the scales curving in natural tandem, the fangs sharp and balanced, the heart-shaped heads spanning out, like capes, rattling the air about them. Sirius imagines this was exactly what James had seen right before he got attacked…wondering if this was how he would die, without ever seeing Sirius again…

Once Sirius has spotted the two snakes on the bed, he can’t sees them everywhere—on the bronze door handles, on the faucets, on the tongues lolling out of ancient crumbling-plaster statues. He sees them on the most unexpected of places, jerking every time; he’ll lose his cover by noon at this rate. He reminds himself that James is _fine._ In fact, he’s probably just waking up and realizing Sirius had left in his sleep and bawling to bits.

It takes many a defeat and a lot of discouragement on Sirius’s part to find the perfect place. What checks all the boxes, eventually, is the cupboard by the kitchen. Sure, he does have to dodge a few house elves on the way, but the room is, for once, entirely wooden and not marble. It has the cozy feel of a forest cabin, the kind of place he and James had been dreaming of getting straight after the war ends so they can scamper around as their furry counterparts. Settling down in here, the Universe spares him a few moments to forget the fact that he’s holed up in the center of a snake-infested mansion. The bonus is the access to food: he easily grabs a leftover fruit plate from breakfast.

The boredom commences. The wardrobe Dumbledore had been obsessed with is not difficult to find, happening to emanate a sour aura of obnoxious importance in the middle of the great hall. The great hall at present also happens to be deserted. By dusk, Sirius has already done a fair bit of charm work and come to a confident conclusion. A vanishing cabinet. A little bit more time, and he’ll figure out where it leads. It surely won’t take a _month._

In the evening, he convenes with Remus by the wrought iron fence.

“It’s a vanishing cabinet.”

“Noted,” says Remus, not even a _you figured it out already?_ “And it leads where?”

“I’m still figuring it out, alright? Merlin, Moons, give me a break.”

“Noted.”

“Listen,” Sirius pulls out Narcissa Malfoy’s mask. “Take this to Prongs, would you?”

“I’m a messenger, Padfoot, not a _mailman.”_ Remus takes it anyway. “Speaking of, a message from James Potter.”

“Fire away.”

“‘You didn’t say you were leaving at four AM.’” Remus’s tone is dead-neutral, but Sirius knows exactly how James must have sounded. Deafening.

“Roger that.”

“Look,” Remus sighs, taking off his _official messenger of the Order_ mask to look disappointed at Sirius. “Couldn’t you have at least woken him up? What was all the hurry?”

Sirius shrugs. He knows Remus understands; he’s only asking for James’s sake.

Sirius sports a grin. “That mask is a real work of art, if you look closely—see if he’ll appreciate the souvenir, eh?”

Figuring out the works of a vanishing cabinet is deceivingly hard. He abandons piece of food after food for experimentation — when he places an apple, it disappears; a slice of bread, it doesn’t. Every day it leaves him annoyed, not to mention hungry, and his only reprieve comes from his daily souvenir hunt.

To his amusement, Narcissa’s mask had received critical acclaim: “Reckon this’ll scare off the old sprogs next trick-or-treating?”— ad-verbum.

After the mask had been a book, retrieved from the family library, on the topic of mystic deer and their omens. It had some neat stuff inside, like how the difference between magical and non-magical deer was in the ear-shape (Prongs the Deer, deductively, was not a squib), or the tables that showed the compatibility of deer with other species, including canines (“Compatible,” followed by double-asterisk: “May show strong tendencies to vex each other in respective mating seasons.”) Sirius thought that if this were true, he and James would have been fucking since Sorting.

After the book had been a dagger, freshly stolen from Bellatrix’s drawer. It was clearly goblin-made.

And so on.

He feeds eagerly on Remus’s messages, them being the only connection to the outside world and to James. He tries every charm Dumbledore suggests on the wardrobe and returns every evening with more or less a failure report.

“He asked if you’ve used the Homenum Revelio,” says Remus.

“Of course I have, on _day one,_ actually—the idiot, does he think I got an O in Defense for nothing?”

“Is this your message to him?”

“Not word for word, no,” Sirius relents.

If every message from Dumbledore sinks him into lower spirits, every one from James does the reverse. A week or so in, Remus had started showing up with pieces of paper.

The first night he does so, he rolls out the parchment with a sigh and a _Lumos_ , voice not bothering to replicate James’s cheer as he drones aloud the follows:

“’Moony! Write it down! Come on, I know you don’t remember everything I say every time. You’ve been summarizing, haven’t you? Hey, here’s a piece of paper. And here’s a Quick-Quotes Quill! Neat, innit? OK. Great! So. Hi, Padfoot! How’s it going in GloomyLand? My wound healed completely today and I could go on a mission again. Fought a couple Dementors who’d flown inland from Azkaban — and hey, my Patronus’s ears were round! Never paid attention to them before, but glad to know I’m full of magic. Miss you. Alright, bye. Oh, wait! One more thing! No, Moony, not yet! I forgot to ask, is it safe, do you think? I mean, would Sirius mind?’”

“What?” Sirius frowns.

Remus pulls out an object from the depths of his cloak. It glitters under the moon; at first it looks like silver of some sort. But there’s an abundance of Goblin-quality silver at the Manor, so James wouldn’t bother.

Remus continues with the message. “‘Sirius, I think you forgot this. Keep it in your pocket, will you? Might come in useful. Love from J.’”

The Invisibility Cloak. Sirius takes the bundle in his hand and feels the cool fabric cascade through his fingers.

“…Sirius?”

“Er…” Sirius’s voice catches slightly; he’s surprised he’s so affected. It’s just the Cloak, after all. James had been right, although the Cloak was passed down by his father, it was essentially both of theirs — Sirius used it so much he had as much right to it as James did. So, it’s just the Cloak.

And the “Love from J.” And his stupid round deer ears.

“No,” says Sirius. He shoves the Clock back into Remus’s hand.

“No?”

“I don’t need it. He does,” Sirius explains. “Please, Remus, get it back to him, will you?”

He feels pretty much useless regarding the vanishing cabinet, but that doesn’t mean he’s useless in everything else. For one, he brings back to the Order everything he overhears at the meetings and dinners.

The attack on Diagon Alley was decided so suddenly he couldn’t wait until evening to tell Remus. He pictures James dancing in his pajamas and conjures a Patronus, hoping Dumbledore has a few Order members on leave that could hop in a battle.

People at the Manor start trickling out — they have to do everything in a hierarchical way, so it’s the non-Malfoys who leave first. The underdogs of the gang: fresh-out-of-Hogwarts kids and beta werewolves. The Malfoys, the Lestranges, and the Blacks (most of whom Sirius recognizes from long-ago extended-family banquets at which even the candles quivered) take their sweet time preparing themselves. Sirius observes as they twiddle with their watches and curl their hair around their fingers, and is struck by the realization that if everyone in the Manor was leaving, there would be no one to heed the intruder alarm should Sirius leave and re-enter. The protective wards the Malfoys have only alert those who are _within_ the gates — if Sirius joins the battle, wins, and slips back inside the Manor before anyone comes home, he can continue on with his mission, no commotion necessary.

The last resident to leave is obvious. Lucius Malfoy’s shocking-white hair glints farther down the portrait hallway and disappears from view. Sirius apparates after him.

He hadn’t been prepared to see _James_ first thing, especially when he hadn’t expected to see him at all for a month. James is currently involved in a three-on-one duel, the “three” being one human and two werewolves. Sirius can’t take a werewolf-bitten James, not right after the horrific sight of Nagini-bitten James. Well, Sirius doesn’t like anything-bitten James, but he especially doesn’t need another werewolf in his life.

“You tossers! I saw your horrifying grades when —“James ducks, dodging two curses at once, “— when I snuck in McGonagall’s office with my best mate!”

 _Don’t pull me into this, mate,_ Sirius rolls his eyes and pulls out his wand.

He jumps in, still invisible, firing curse after curse from behind the Death Eaters, who all shout and look around themselves as they sport not-so-secretly-terrified glares toward an undefinable location. James looks confused, too, his wand uncertainly waving at where Sirius is. But he also isn’t James for nothing, and he proceeds to stun all three distracted Death Eaters in a flash.

By that moment, the battle seems to be dwindling. Sirius knows that the Diagon Alley surprise is just a distraction, anyway — the higher-up Death Eaters are currently scaling Gringotts Bank for some kind of precious stone. He trusts that Dumbledore has sent people there as well.

So, instead of hurrying to Gringotts, he steals a few seconds to have James to himself.

“Psst.”

James twirls on the spot, wand locked in his grasp — pointing it at a spot that’s at least a few feet away from Sirius.

“Your aim can improve, Prongs.”

James gasps. “ _Sirius!”_ He starts walking forward with severely squinted eyes, hands outstretched in front of him like a poor mime.

So, Sirius guides him into a closed-off alleyway and then into an embrace, and tries not to melt altogether into the suddenly overwhelming smell of pillows and pranks.

James grips him back. “Fuck. Can I see you? Just for a little bit.”

Another heart beats right up against Sirius's, alive and healthy and a notch faster than what you’d expect from hugging your best friend.

“Can’t.” Sirius releases him.

James looks miserable. His hands cling onto Sirius’s chest, as if his touch by itself will make Sirius stay.

“It takes a few minutes to completely Disillusion myself. I have to make it back to the Manor, though, before everyone comes in and catches me. I can’t risk it.”

“The Cloak. See, you should have taken it with you.”

Sirius rolls his eyes. “Tell me you haven’t needed it at all in your missions after I left.”

“I — I learned how to Disillusion, too.”

 _He didn’t have to._ “Great. Now we both know how to do it.”

“Sirius,” says James, squinting at Sirius’s nose — he’d evidently forgotten how tall Sirius is. He frowns, like he’s remembering something. “Avoid mirrors.”

“What?”

“When you’re Disillusioned — People find out something’s odd when you stand in front of a mirror, because they don’t see their own reflection. They just see a blank mirror. I… meant to tell you tonight through Remus, but since you’re here…”

“Oh,” says Sirius. “OK.”

James’s hands trail up Sirius’s chest, reaching his shoulders, his neck, like he’s trying to remember how Sirius is shaped.

“Prongs, have you been reading about Disillusionment?” Sirius chuckles.

Then James touches his jaw.

He frowns in concentration, but this time his gaze is spot-on, zeroed in on Sirius’s mouth.

Sirius stills his insides.

Someone shouts. “Head back! Head back to the Manor!”

“Shit.” Sirius jumps away from James.

James’s hands clutch at empty air, lips splitting in surprise and eyes screwing up all over again.

“James, I’ve got to go. Nice seeing you!” 

He barely makes it back to the Manor and shut down the alarm, and he broods in his cupboard, for the rest of the day, on the way James’s shoulders had almost indiscernibly dropped when Sirius had (very much unintentionally) pushed him away at the most unfortunate second.

The following weeks are as miserable as Sirius remembers life at the Blacks to have been. Not only has he not figured out the other end of the vanishing cabinet; the great hall has become more frequently occupied after their (fortunately) failed attempt to infiltrate Gringotts.

Disillusionment may camouflage his skin, but it won’t hide his charm work and it sure wouldn’t keep the vanishing cabinet from opening and closing in clear view. Consequently, Sirius has been spending the better part of the week after the battle listening to arguments bouncing off the barren windows (more like shouting matches, with Voldemort hissing, “Silence!” to end every single one — Once, he’d accidentally said it in Parseltongue, and Nagini, to the extent possible for a snake, had looked bewildered. One Death Eater coughed, another bit their lip to keep their reactions hidden. It was also known as the day Sirius learned that even The Dark Lord TM had his share of day-to-day blunders).

The only reason Sirius stays in the room, in these occasions, is that something useful does slip out of someone’s mouth every once in a while. He’s long been tired of not being of any use to the Order while James is out there somewhere, dueling Death Eaters and saving Muggles.

He foregoes sleep to investigate the wardrobe by night — the more he gets frustrated with it, the more it seems to grow reluctant to vanish anything, let alone give clues as to _where_ it vanishes. One night, as he’s tapping his wand on the handle, half of his mind still ruminating over the night’s message from James (“Some of your souvenirs have been questionable, that’s for sure, but a _tooth?_ Really? And you don’t know whose it _is?”_ ), a swarm of black robes squeeze into the hall.

Thunder rolls outside; rain hits glass. Sirius sighs, sitting down. Meetings never happened after dark — perhaps this was an urgent one. If it was urgent, it was bound to contain information.

Fenrir Greyback cracks some awful joke and laughs at himself. His front tooth is missing. Hah. Useful information number one. Its precise usefulness is at present undefined.

“Is something wrong with the window, do you think?” says a man’s voice.

Sirius looks about the hall — three sides are entirely of glass panes, sectioned by looming marble pillars. None of it seems to be out of the ordinary.

The Death Eater stands several feet in front of Sirius, transfixed at his own reflection in the glass. The man beside him squints with him.

_Avoid mirrors._

Sirius freezes. If he moves, they will surely recognize the human-shaped gap scurrying across their reflection. The only place he can hide happens to be sitting just next to him. The cabinet.

He waits until the Death Eaters shrug at each other and take their seats, before he slips himself into the dark.

Apparently, the increasing reluctance of the vanishing cabinet had been an accumulation of sorts. What energy it had been saving up until this moment, it decides to use _now_ — The cracks of light seal off with a _zip_ as Sirius is plummeted into the abyss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just had to throw J in there somewhere; otherwise the chapter sounded terrifically boring. I'm sure the real Sirius has a much more entertaining internal monologue; I'm just trying to reach it.
> 
> Next chapter will be fun, I promise.


	3. Of Reappearances, Refrigerators,  and Retained Quadratic Equations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait and thanks for being patient! As a (cheap, I know) apology I updated two chapters at once, so now this fic is completed!!! (The next chapter is technically an epilogue, so this one's the last juicy one!) 
> 
> P.S. I have no idea why I decided to use math. Just saying. I’m not a nerd or anything who feels the urge to use math in everything, including fic. I simply couldn’t find information on PotterWiki on how exactly vanishing cabinets worked so I had to devise one on my own…:(

**Of Reappearances, Refrigerators, and Retained Quadratic Equations**

Sirius sighs.

At least he got away from a congregation of two dozen Death Eaters — even _he_ wouldn’t have been able to pull through it if he’d gotten caught. And now that he looks around in complete darkness, he isn’t consumed by blind panic or despair; in fact the whole affair seems familiar to him, as he’s thrown back to the many nights locked up in the Blacks’ attic as punishment for causing mayhem all-around, or for attempts at “indoctrinating” his brother.

He rummages in his pocket for anything that could be of any use. A slimy substance rolls between his fingers and, upon illuminating his wand, he discovers a half-blackening core of an apple. Great, if he was going to spend some time here, the first thing he would need was food.

He lies back on the bottom of the cabinet and throws his legs up against the side, transfiguring his apple into its original state and biting into it. It gushes something spectacularly sour in his mouth and his jaw seizes up.

He did happen to have vanished an apple in the cabinet once; it had taken around ten seconds for it to reappear. Which means that it had taken approximately five seconds to reach the other end.

The vanishing cabinet uses magic to thwart gravity. Gravity pulls in a quadratic function… If it took five seconds for an apple, and an apple, say, weighed 0.1 kilograms, and Sirius weighed about 70…

Well, good thing he’s well-versed in math—he’d read books on them purely to spite his parents, but ended up developing a keen interest in their areas of study. Now, he’s using it to estimate how long he would have to wait in the darkness with nothing but an apple.

Sirius uses the stem of said apple to etch on the wood beside him. A couple equations in, and he’s left with the number 3,430,000. This was in seconds, so… About 40 hours.

It had been around midnight when the Death Eaters had come in the great hall. It would be the afternoon of the day after tomorrow that Sirius would be released into the outside world. By then, he would have missed two of his little catch-ups with Remus.

James would worry.

 _James._ Just what Sirius wouldn’t give to reach him right now. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little telephone of sorts, just for the two of them? Except, they wouldn’t just hear each other’s voices, they’d be able to _see_. Like a…television. A video, in color. A… _mirror._

Yes, that was it. A two-way mirror. The magic would be difficult enough it would easily occupy Sirius’s mind for the next forty hours. He sets to work, flicking his wand to push the Lumos charm a notch brighter and brandishing his apple stem once again.

But thinking of James, particularly of seeing his face and _talking_ to him… It ignites a deep ache in his gut, an internal scratch that’s been forced under a bandage all along. His forehead drops against the cabinet wall and his eyes fall close, suddenly exhausted, and he wants nothing more than to take a hot bath while maybe listening to James sing his tits out in the other room. Then, he’d get out, change, and have dinner. With cake for dessert. Cheesecake.

He fights down a dreamy smile, shakes his head, and palms his crotch. It’s a sure-fire way to release tension, and he completely is not expecting James to also star in _this_ : The way James laughs at his jokes, chases him around on his broom, throws bits of food at him to catch his attention. How he’d kissed and come on the bed, rutting into Sirius’s thigh…And back in Diagon Alley, the solid way he had looked at his lips, as though Sirius’s Disillusionment charm had simply not worked on him…

Sirius’s jaw clenches, back seizing up against one side of the cabinet and feet scrambling against the opposite. He misses James awfully and, for once, can not be bothered to mull over the moral implications of jerking off to his best mate. _Fuck, I miss you,_ his mind supplies, as he releases the last futile pretense of resistance.

Sunlight streams through the cabinet gaps. Padfoot nudges his head against the door, but it opens just a crack. It would be at least another minute until it let loose.

He barks and stretches his paws in four directions; being a dog animagus had helped tremendously during his confinement. He shakes himself and does a few leaps. He’s started panting and his tail wags maniacally. On second note, being an animagus of an animal a little bit less pathetic would have been nice. The deer would have been impressed.

Internally, Sirius cringes at himself for thinking about James; it excites the dog to no avail. _Calm the fuck down._ Padfoot barks and yips, propping himself up on his haunches so he can scrabble at the door with his two front paws.

At his insistence, the cabinet opens. Sunlight strikes his vision white, but he can’t spare even a few seconds, turning to his smell for navigation. It’s obvious he’s somewhere in Knockturn alley; it’s not everywhere that it smells like burnt acidic cauldrons and dead fish. He catches a drift from Diagon — smell of gold, wood, _strawberry_ _ice cream_ — and trots off, yipping.

When his vision clears, he becomes aware of other people, who glare at him and throw their smelly little feet and canes out of the way. At least once he’s entered Diagon, people start paying him the right kind of attention. Some gasp, some coo, the little girls giggle with their mothers.

“It’s so _big!”_

Past the Leaky Cauldron and into Muggle London — he takes one glance around and assesses it’s safe to show himself. He apparates home.

James scrambles up from the couch, wand ready, a deer in headlights.

Sirius cocks his head sideways. “It’s me.”

James’s wand drops with a _clatter._ His lip catches between his teeth and he takes a shaky breath, twisting his hair in his hand. “You came back,” he says, in a small voice, and burieshimself head-first into Sirius’s chest.

“Hey,” Sirius chuckles. He takes the first breath in what feels like _days —_ James’s hair smells like old pillows and snaggy, threadbare carpets.

“You reek of dog,” says James.

“Makes sense. Been living as one for the past forty hours.”

“You should probably shower.”

“I agree.” Sirius lets go.

James clutches him immediately. His glasses dig into his shoulder, his nose sniffing further into his alleged dog-reek, and his hug grows less comforting, more suffocating.

Sirius accepts it anyway. “Merlin’s trousers, if I’m not positively famished.”

“You haven’t eaten, have you?”

“I haven’t eaten anything but the same apple on repeat.”

James releases him, looking away and trying to resettle his skewed glasses with a brush of a forearm. Sirius sees red, dry eyes.

“ _You_ haven’t slept.”

James shrugs. “I’ll whip something up. There must be stuff in the fridge.” He tries a small smile. His gaze flicks up to Sirius for one tiny moment.

“Thanks,” says Sirius. “Listen, I have to go see Dumbledore now…Let him know about the cabinet…Be back in a couple of hours, alright?”

“Oh.” James crosses his arms and squeezes himself, as if willing himself not to reach out yet again.

Sirius wishes he would let go.

James tears his gaze away from him and glances out the window, expression flat. “Oh, alright,” he says. “Be…be back soon. For food, you know.”

“Ah, Sirius.” Dumbledore smiles. “You managed it back.”

“Hi,” Sirius takes a seat. “I was stuck in the cabinet for two days. Got myself in a tight situation and… had to get inside. It leads to Borgin and Burkes. In Knockturn Alley.”

Dumbledore nods. “Some of us were quite worried for you… If you still hadn’t met with Remus tonight, we were going to send a party in search of you.”

“I’m glad you didn’t have to, sir.”

“It was James’s idea, of course,” says Dumbledore smoothly.

Sirius’s stomach does a somersault. He nods curtly. “I’m glad he didn’t.”

“Yes, you are.” Dumbledore looks at him knowingly. Something in his smile doesn’t reach his eyes, which are full of force and strangely without their usual twinkle, as if urging Sirius. Sirius doesn’t understand _what_.

They chat for a while, and Sirius finds his mind frequently wandering back to James. Now, this isn’t anything new, except that James had seemed odd today. Yes, he’d seemed relieved to have Sirius back, but he hadn’t necessarily looked _happy_. Especially considering that when James was happy, it was obvious to the whole world. He first of all wouldn’t be shy as hell _._

It hurt to see James like that. Perhaps something had happened while Sirius was away — but his letters had sounded cheerful enough.

“Your mind seems to be elsewhere, Sirius,” Dumbledore says.

“Sorry.”

“You had a long month, and you did well. Please go get some rest. You won’t be assigned anything for a while.”

Sirius comes home to find take-out boxes by the doorway, and a sprawled-out James fast asleep on the sofa. He hadn’t taken “I’ll whip something up” to mean take-out, specifically, but something light and feathery catches in his chest nonetheless. He summons a blanket and drapes it over the unconscious figure, a huff of laughter escaping him.

Now that he looks around properly, he notices the volumes of books splayed out all over the rug and a particularly tall mountain of them towered by James’s feet. He moves closer to discern the titles: “Five Ancient Warding Charms and How to Break Them” has an image of a spooky mansion on the cover, “The Vanishing Cabinet and its Ill-Known Facts” has a rainbow of Post-It’s sticking out in a rainbow mane, and one enormous book that’s laid open has algebra on it, with the heading _How to Solve a Quadratic Equation in Five Easy Steps_ printed in bubbly lettering, followed by spectacled cartoons explaining in bubble-gum-shaped speech bubbles.

And scrawls of parchment. Figures, each easily the size of a small donut, litter the vast area in the shapes of numbers and equal signs and most of all, question marks. One thing is underlined four times and is caged in by an army of arrows:

39.6990740741 HOURS!!!!! DOES THIS MEAN BETWEEN 39 AND 40 (← ASK REMUS)

Sirius snorts. He’s slightly impressed James had been able to come this far in a couple of days; he had virtually no background in maths. Living with James for so long tended to desensitize Sirius to just how smart he really was…

Sirius looks at him. James doesn’t seem to be anywhere near waking up, his glasses askew somewhere on the left corner of his forehead — Sirius gently takes them off and reveals a bright red mark imprinted by the hinge.

He goes to kitchen and opens what James got for take-out. His stomach squeals at the sight of sushi: Neat squares of salmon and cream cheese and cucumber in each fat roll —and James had even made sure to order the Teriyaki sauce as an extra topping (Sirius had just once declared he didn’t like soy sauce).

Sirius takes a roll in his mouth, groans, and looks in the fridge for any drinks. There’s hardly anything in it. Just as he’s wondering what James has been eating for the past month, his eyes catch on the garbage bin, where paper, plastic, and styrofoam boxes pile into what could easily count as a small hill. He rolls his eyes and settles for tap water.

It was a good thing that Sirius wasn’t going on another month-long mission anytime soon. Honestly, it was like coming home to find a child in place of a full-grown wizard…

Said wizard yawns loudly.

“Oi!” Sirius calls.

James pokes his head up from the couch. “Sirius! You started dinner without me!”

“Since when have we ever waited for each other to eat?”

James pads over, grinning. His eyes look clear without the (smudgy) glasses. A good length of hair licks up against the back of his head in a shark fin. Sirius resists the urge to tidy it up (as far as it will “tidy”) and resorts to an insult.

“Didn’t take the opportunity to actually learn some cooking while I was away, did you?”

“Oh, why would I have bothered?” says James, yawning again.

Grubby fingers reach into Sirius’s bento box — Sirius snatches it closer to him, but it’s too late. He proceeds to rub a knuckle on his temple.

“How are you feeling, Pads?” James says around a mouthful of sushi.

“Alright.”

“You spent so long in the cabinet-thing,” James takes a half-chewed piece of sushi from his mouth, dips it in teriyaki sauce, and pops it back in. A couple of stray rice now float in Sirius’s sauce dish. “How long was it, thirty-nine-point-six-nine-nine-zero—“

“Forty hours, James. Forty. It’s called rounding.”

“Oh! Remus said that, too!”

Sirius rolls his eyes. James looks so happy with himself, beaming with seaweed stuck in his teeth. Brown eyes look browner without smudged glasses and hard creases of worry.

“But I figured the rest out,” continues James. “I had a hunch you’d be in the cabinet… If the Death Eaters had caught you, news would have reached us... So I did some maths… _Maths,_ Padfoot, can you imagine? I figured Muggle Maths out!”

“Yes, you did.” Sirius has to smile at that face.

“If you hadn’t come back in thirty-nine-point—uh, forty hours, I would have gone to the Manor myself, but…How could you have been thick enough to end up _inside_ it?”

“I wasn’t _thick,_ James, it was the only way out.”

“Whatever,” says James. “You could have spared me the trouble. Muggle maths is _hard…”_

“It really is a shame wizarding schooling systems don’t teach it, actually. So much of magic relies on natural physics. Take the cabinet for example — it works on gravity, which is a force that pulls things to—“

“Blah, blah,” interrupts James, a tongue lolling out full-length to lick rice off his thumb. “The Quadrangular Equation is as far as I’ll ever get.”

“Quadratic Equation.”

“Yep, that’s the one.” James suddenly claps his hand on his mouth and jumps up. “ _Cake!_ ”

“What?”

“There’s cake in the fridge! I almost forgot!”

“There wasn’t anything in the fridge.”

“I —“ James stops, staring down at his own fingers, stilled around the fridge handle, suddenly small-looking. “Well, I hid it, that’s why.”

“Why did you—“

“You weren’t coming back.” James opens the fridge, swishes his wand and, with both hands, retrieves a previously invisible box from the topmost shelf. “I — you _said_ one month and… I got this on the thirtieth day and… and Remus was saying he hadn’t seen you…” James’s voice goes quieter with every word, the tip of his wand absentmindedly drawing crooked patterns on the top of the box. It singes the paper, leaving a purplish trail. “Every time I opened the fridge I — saw the cake and it — _reminded_ me — we were supposed to have _had_ it already _—“_

“I get it, James,” says Sirius. Seeing James hiccuping for words like that makes it hard to talk himself. “It’s alright now, right? I’m back. Body and soul.”

James sighs. “You open it,” he says, shoving the cake in Sirius’s direction, like suddenly it’s the last thing he wants to see.

Again, that weirdness. Retreated into his shell, as if he ever had one to begin with. Sirius had forgotten how James had acted exactly this way this afternoon.

Sirius opens the box anyway. _Cheesecake._

He tries not to swallow so visibly, feeling a prickle at the back of his eyes. “Thanks a lot, Prongs..”

“Welcome home,” mutters James.

Sirius looks up with a cocked eyebrow, holding a plate with a piece of cake in offering. James takes it, warm touch momentarily on Sirius’s fingers — it brushes, sparks, leaves him dumbfounded.

James, heedless of the fork, takes a big bite from his hand.

Sirius tries his own piece.

“Good?” James says, muffled.

“Oh, yeah.” In truth, Sirius doesn’t know. The cake could taste like Hippogriff dung for all he knew. His tastebuds abandon their work to run off on an imaginary highway, drooling as James flicks his tongue over his own lips and catches the dribbling crumbs, his throat working in big gulps.

“Merlin,” James says brightly.

Sirius finishes his cake in silence and gives a groan of satisfaction so James won’t see what’s odd, and sets his plate down. “That was great. I think I wouldn’t mind having a good bath now…”

“Oh,” says James. He talks down at his untouched fork. “Can I…? Um, with you? I… I think I should probably wash, too.”

Sirius gawks at him. James wants to get in the _bath_ with Sirius? Sure, they’d been in the prefects’ bath together, loads of times, in fact… Nonetheless, their home bathtub just happened to be a notch smaller than that.

But Sirius couldn’t refuse an opportunity if his life depended on it.

“I don’t see why not.” He tries a shrug but his shoulders are unhinged.

“Brilliant!” James exclaims, already skipping out of the kitchen. “You do the dishes!”

“I always do,” Sirius huffs to himself.

James is already settled to the chin in bubbles when Sirius enters the bathroom.

“Merlin, I’m exhausted,” says Sirius, taking off his shirt. He’d never been shy around James before and he wonders why it’s started _now._ It’s not like he suddenly popped a crush for James — his feelings for James are so old it usually tended to get mixed up inside Sirius with the other facts inherent to life itself.

It doesn’t help that James’s stare follows him with every garment that Sirius discards. Sirius can’t help but feel _checked out,_ for Merlin’s sake, by his age-old best mate — he tries to assess his body without actually looking at it, with pure intuition. He must not look that great right now…He had been living off of apples for the last two days, and before that, for a month, he had been poking around the Malfoys’ kitchen for leftovers like a starved rat.

Once naked, he slides chest-deep into the water, ignoring the spiking heat (blimey, does James like hot temperatures), hating himself for trying to hide in front of James, out of all people.

James stares into his eyes, still not having had said a word since Sirius came in. It’s like a charged puddle of unspoken words has sprung between them — first this afternoon, then in the kitchen, then _here,_ sharing the same fucking bathtub. Sirius knows full-well which words _he_ hasn’t been speaking all these years, but what are _James’s?_ _I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea the night before you left? I didn’t know how to tell you but I met someone while you are away and now I’m seeing her/him/them…Do you mind?_

Sirius doesn’t ask, and it’s all he can hope for James not to answer an unasked question. It’s still James, after all, and the silence between them is as comfortable as it can get.

In fact, the silence is so cozy it guides him into a lull. For the first time in a month, he doesn’t dream anything that has some strange or dystopian element, or worse, has _James_ mixed up with those elements. He simply feels the steam cloud him, reaching into the deep pores of him that smells like dogs and Malfoys, letting himself feel happy that he’s at last home…

Something jabs his rib.

Sirius wakes with a start. His arms flail around for his wand; he props himself up on his knees and slips because they’re wet, in fact everything’s wet, and foggy, and _where is his fucking wand?_

He’s in the bath.

With James.

Sirius shakes his head.

“Pads?” 

James’s foot visibly retreats underneath the bubbles, along with the treacherous big toe that presumably poked Sirius into panic.

“Fuck,” Sirius says, tips his head back, and closes his eyes.

“Sorry,” says James quietly.

“Nah,” Sirius shrugs him off. “Must have been...on edge… at the Manor… ’S not like anything happened, but y’know, unconsciously.”

“Yeah. I know. Fuck, I’m _sorry._ ”

Sirius pops open an eye.

James looks away, gripping at his own hair and covering his face with one thrown-out arm. “I didn’t mean to… _do_ that…”

“Yeah, I _know_ , Prongs, what are you going all depressed over? It’s _fine_. Merlin, get a grip.”

James rubs his face with stiff hands.

“Hey, Prongs. Have you ever heard Parseltongue?”

“Parseltongue?” James perks up, hands splashing back into the water.

_Attention diverted._

“Yeah. Snake language.”

“I know what it _is,”_ says James, indignant. “But you’ve _heard_ it?”

“Yeah. Spoken by our one and only.”

“Voldemort? _”_

Sirius nods. “Talks to his snake soulmate in Parseltongue.”

“Whoa,” James hitches himself up, elbows braced on the edges, a young boy about to hear a bedtime fairytale. “What does it sound like?”

Sirius thinks, shrugs, and gives his best try. “ _Saaaaasssshiiiiiiisthoooossiiiaaaaa…”_

James laughs, but Sirius keeps going. “Sssspphhhhhhheeeethaaaerra…kaaaasssaaaaaeeeeeveeerrr…”

James’s eyes twinkle in the fog, orbs of oak-brown that expand in wonder and contract in amusement.

“Ssshhhhheeeepheeeethaaa…”

Then James begins to _move_ , his torso swaying to Sirius’s expert snake-syllables, his hands joining together in a praying gesture and snaking their way up, up, up. At Sirius’s “shaaaa” his tongue pokes out and makes rapid rattling motions, at his “sheeeeeth” the tongue retreats and the lips draw back, revealing hissing teeth.

At one point, Sirius has to stop and laugh. If anyone could get into the oddest moods in a confined bathtub, it was James. Yet it was strangely mesmerizing, how his body so tough and tight on the broom could be so agile _off_ of it, how the slightest prompting on Sirius’s part can make him go so relaxed, so hilarious, so wonderfully creative.

“James,” Sirius chuckles.

James, having realized Sirius has stopped hissing, does so himself. “Hiiiissssssss!” His torso snakes above the surface and a wet trickle of hair glints, vertical on his abdomen..

“Oi, James,” Sirius says, sharper than he meant to. “ _Oi._ ” He sips water into his mouth and squirts it at James’s face.

His aim is perfect.

James squawks, suddenly human again. He ducks his faceunderwater and whines in the form of bubbles, splashing out half of the contents of the tub in the process.

Sirius snorts, observing as James kicks against the other side — and shoots head-first into him.

“What the fuck, Prongs.”

James, suddenly inches from Sirius, squeeze-blinks water out of his eyes and jiggles his head. Even more water flies out of his hair in all directions. If a normal person got flatter hair after getting out of the water, in James’s case it was exactly the opposite.

Without thinking, Sirius kisses the tip of his nose.

James’s eyes fly open.

Sirius swallows and, this time with deliberation, tilts his head in a question.

James doesn’t move in. He doesn’t move back, either.

So Sirius does what he had in mind the whole time. Properly, on the mouth.

The noise James gives out is beyond pleasureful, bordering on frustration, _anger —_ he curls Sirius’s hair around his fingers and _pulls_ , painfully, holding onto it for better leverage as he clambers onto his lap and kisses back with swelling vigor.

“S- _Sirius.”_ James’s gasp is warmer than the steam around them; Sirius struggles to breathe, to clear his head of fog, and his own arms won’t give himself a break as they tug James even _closer_ until their growing hard-ons rub into contact.

“Mnnngh!” James shifts on his lap. “ _Sirius!”_

His knees dig into the spaces beside Sirius’s thighs, his elbows wrap around Sirius’s neck, heaving himself up and down and generally making water crash all around them.

“Yeah,” Sirius breathes into James’s neck, and licks it for good measure. He can’t keep doing this anymore, with his groin about to explode, pulled apart by both bliss and not-enough-bliss at the same time — he catches James by the armpits and heaves him up, himself closely following.

They drip a trail to the bed, despite Sirius’s best efforts to wrap James in a towel, because James tries to kiss him and fondle his balls and bite his neck all at once, and the towel meets its inevitable fate on the floor.

Snake-James back in the bathtub had looked surely fascinating, but James sprawled on the bed, _without_ an injury, is a sight that quite physically makes Sirius’s throat constrict — James spreads his legs open without a trace of hesitance, tugging Sirius’s hands until they ram onto the sheets with the rest of his body closely following. And Sirius is now left with not only an eyeful of James, but a bodyful, a mouthful, a beautiful chapter-ful of a story he’d been writing and re-writing since fifteen.

“Sirius,” James writhes like he’s in pain, shoving his lower half repeatedly _upward_ — “I — _please…”_

Fuck, if Sirius needed any more encouragement.

“Whatever you want, J.”

He conjures lube on his palm and wraps it around James. He starts off slow; he couldn’t do it faster if his life depended on it, wanting more and more of James’s anguished little whimpers and the way his hips _move_ under Sirius’s grip, egging him impatiently on — Merlin be damned.

When Sirius catches his cock in his mouth, James screams — hands clutched onto the headboard above his head, gaze dragging down to make sense of the _thing_ around his _cock._ Sirius meets his eyes and, without blinking, sinks as low as he can get, and sucks.

“ _Mmph!”_ James kicks at the air. “Uh, _unh…”_

His free hand catches in Sirius’s hair, and again, that proud, stubborn _pain_ spiking in his scalp…

Something glints in his periphery.

On James’s bedside drawer are a few dozen items scattered around…

“Si!” says James, this time less aroused, more annoyed.

“Jamie,” Sirius laughs around James’s tip; James squeals, hips curling — “Have you been _sleeping_ next to those?”

It apparently takes a moment for Sirius’s words to register, and when they do, James takes one glance at the objects in mention and glares.

“So what if I did? If I’m not mistaken, you were in the middle of a _blow—“_

“Seriously, J? Next to… Narcissa Malfoy’s _mask?_ And Grayback’s _tooth?”_

“Grayback?!”

“Yeah. I found out it was him. Didn’t know it at the time I gave it to you.”

“You mean when you gave it to me _through Remus._ Merlin, he’ll _kill_ you for that… I can’t believe you handed his _tooth_ to him — I bet Greyback hasn’t brushed his teeth since the day he was _born_.”

Sirius sucks James cock again, mind still a little floaty, conjuring images of James coming back to his bedroom each night and laying down a new souvenir, adding it to his little collection…

James sits up, so suddenly it nearly chokes Sirius, who had happened to be throat-deep around him, mind. James grabs his shoulders, muscles in his stomach shifting as he wrestles him onto his back.

“Don’t _think_ about anything else when I’m about to ride you, Sirius.”

Sirius, for once, fails to find the headspace necessary for a snort or even an easy smirk. His cock jumps just at the _mention_ of it — _James is gonna. James is gonna._

Fuck. James is going to.

James reaches a finger behind himself, catching his lip between his teeth as he works it inside. Sirius can’t see, can’t really follow what’s happening, but James’s brows pinch up, and he hisses, stomach contracting in what is either pain or impatience or, most likely, impatience _at_ the pain.

“Hey,” Sirius speaks up. “Prongs, quit it.”

“W-what?” James blubbers as his hand is pulled away from his bum.

“You’ve never done this, have you? With a bloke.”

James doesn’t deny it, but he swallows. His cock is far less harder than it had been in Sirius’s mouth.

“Here, I can show you, alright? Don’t be embarrassed, J, that isn’t convenient.”

“Convenient for _what?”_ James says, a little resentful.

“Convenient for loosening you up. Will you let me?” Sirius asks, lubed fingers at the ready.

James lifts his hips in response, his half-hard cock flagging slightly downward. Sirius hums and reaches behind him, taking time to find his hole and brush against it.

James’s brows knit over once again.

“How are you feeling, hmm?” says Sirius. His voice can be pretty smooth and caring when he needs it to be; it’s just rare for him to use it, even on James.

“Good,” James says, eyes fluttering under Sirius’s gaze. They close completely when Sirius breaches him, fingertip first. “Oh.”

“Tell me to stop, alright? Anytime.”

James nods rapidly, still biting his lips, and moves his hand to his cock to distract himself.

“It feels weird at first,” Sirius explains. “It’s OK, it’ll get better. Just take your time.”

He adds a second finger, making sure to push around the rim and feel it give before sliding it in.

James huffs with every breath. His face pinches and relaxes, back and forth. 

“Good job, Jamie,” Sirius encourages him, now circling his fingers around to find his sweet-spot. “That’s it.”

Then, something hits — James cries out, arching backwards, his hand stopped completely on his cock. His bum constricts and quivers. Awe-struck eyes dart to Sirius’s.

Sirius nods at him. “Yeah, that’s the one.” He nudges the spot again; now James’s eyes roll back in his head.

Relishing in a rush of accomplishment, Sirius takes the opportunity of a distracted James to pump faster, scissoring wider. He notes James’s unmoving fist around his cock and covers it with his own, jerking him off. James clenches inside his bum.

“ _Oh,_ ” James whimpers, as Sirius hits his prostrate every time, without failure. “ _Oh, oh, fuck, OH —_ Fuck, I’m ready, _I’m ready…”_

“Ready?” Sirius knows James is. It’s himself he’s talking to.

“Yeah, yeah, _yes—”_

James has to physically tug Sirius’s hand off his ass — Sirius had been losing half his mind just by fingering him.

“Right _now,_ Sirius, come on, _”_ James whines, frantically pulling himself up into position. “ _Oh…”_

“Fuck,” Sirius says eloquently, laid on his back and giving away total agency, as James sinks around him in one go. “ _Fuck,_ James.”

James seems to be in a similar trance. His mouth parted in the shape of a lollipop, fingers digging onto Sirius’s chest like it’s his last hold on sanity. Sirius helps him shift up a little, holding onto his waist. James follows like putty at first, melting into whatever rhythm Sirius has set… but with every movement, his confidence grows back, going faster, faster, until he’s jumping on Sirius’s cock.

At one moment Sirius is sure James has reached his height of arrogance: “Oh yeah, Pads, _yes…_ You like that, don’t you?”

Sirius moans as a response, for once unable to keep up with James’s _fucking_ chatter.

“Fuck, I love that, I love it when you make that _noise…_ You like it so much…”

“James,” Sirius says, more or less to stop James’s dirty talk (Sirius won’t come tonight until he absolutely has to). He smiles, actually with both corners of his lips, reaching up a hand to brush the wet fringe off of James’s eyes.

With that, James starts to shake.

“S-Sirius.”

Sirius stills his hips in an instant. He jolts up.

“James?”

James breaks into sobs. His elbow flies up to cover his face and he gasps into the crook of it: heaving, shaking gasps that resound in Sirius’s shocked, pounding chest. He shifts his hips faster, ramming down on Sirius’s confused cock, as if to compensate for the sudden downturn of events.

“James, stop,” Sirius grabs at his waist.

James, somehow, takes it to mean to stop _crying,_ not stop moving _._ So his breath hitches a few times, then rattles, then stills as he stops breathing completely. His hips move as fast as ever, teeth grit and fists clenched on Sirius’s shoulders.

“No, no, no. No,” says Sirius. “Stop. Now.” He has to heave James off of him by the armpits.

James whimpers. “Fuck. I’m…”

“It’s OK. Let’s take a break, shall we?” Sirius mutters, brushing the tip of his nose against James’s cheek. “What is it, hmm?”

“It’s… it’s… _nothing,_ it’s stupid… You’re back now…”

“Yeah, I’m back,” Sirius rakes a hand through James’s fringe, revealing scared, jittery eyes. “What’s stupid?”

James sniffs.

“Come on, Prongs, you say stupid things all the time. What can be so different about this one?”

James sniffs again, but he also rolls his eyes half-heartedly. “It’s just… _”_ His eyelashes flutter as Sirius runs a soft thumb across them, collecting the moisture. “You _w-weren’t_ showing up and… Every time I saw R-Remus, he said he hadn’t seen y-you yet and… a-and now you’re back. Like you weren’t just _gone_ for the past _thirty-two days_ and I… I _can’t…”_

“Sorry,” Sirius says.

“W-what?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t come back when I said I would.”

“No—it’s _OK_ ,” says James, frustrated. “I mean, things got in the way. I _understand_.”

“And, I’m sorry, if I took things too far, too fast,” Sirius gestures between the both of them.

 _“No.”_ James clutches at Sirius’s head, effectively covering his ears.

Sirius debates, until the last moment, whether or not to say it. He could lose a friend over this, a best friend, in fact his _only friend…_ But this was the thing. If James well and truly _was_ his best friend, he _wouldn’t_ react in the way Sirius was fearing, would he…? At the very least, he would…

“I love you,” says James.

Sirius gawks.

James twists his head, eyes averting.

“Fuck, you said it first,” says Sirius, pinching his eyes, but he laughs internally. He curls an unruly lock of hair around his index finger, pulling on it to catch James’s attention. “Look, I love you, too, yeah? It’s alright. Quit moaning.”

Sirius wouldn’t have dreamed of saying something like that so _lightly._ It had always been a life-or-death question for him, the ultimate _to-say-or-not-to-say,_ the potential turning point in the path of the friendship he depended upon with his undivided soul…James’s rejection — not of Sirius’s feelings, but of him _entirely_ — would have done far worse than any war that was happening outside.

James smiles shyly, hopefully. “You really do?”

“Yeah.”

James sniffs for the last time and, laughing, kisses him. “ _Pads,_ I love you so _fucking_ much I… I couldn’t bear it, not having told you before you left…”

Sirius chuckles, laying James down once more on his back, covering him with his own body. James goes easily, limp and light in his arms. “I kept thinking of you at the Manor,” admits Sirius. “And in the cabinet. In fact, I jerked off to you in the cabinet.”

“Y-you really did?”

“Oh, yeah. You would have done the same, I’m sure. After a short while in the cabinet, you start running out of things to do.”

James exclaims, somewhere between an indignant snort and a bright laugh.

Sirius covers the noise with his mouth and licks. “Now, did you want to finish or not?”

“Yeah,” James says immediately, rutting his hips.

Sirius catches his cock in his hand and, slowly, pushes back inside. The heat. The tightness. It rolls into him and coils in his gut, presses further in at the _sight_ of James, his opening jaw, his knitting brows.

“ _Oh,”_ whimpers James.

“ _You_ like this, don’t you.”

James’s eyes squeeze shut. He clenches a fist around the sheets, brings it to his mouth, and moans long and loud.

Sirius doesn’t like to hear it so muffled.

He yanks James’s fist away and locks his wrist beside his head, ramming his hips still harder in the next moment. This time, the moan is sharp and clear, but broken in places, unhesitant in letting go its full expression of desire. Dear _James._ His fucking _voice,_ coming out like that. Sirius is close.

He presses his face into James’s shoulder, biting at the skin he finds there — James cries out — Sirius breathes into his collarbone, “God, you feel so good, Jamie, so good” — James giggles breathily and his legs fling up to hug around him, tug him _closer_. Sirius speeds up the pace, groans escaping him at every other thrust, elbows grounding themselves in the sheets so he can lift himself up, look properly as James is brought to the peak of pleasure…

“SIRIUS!” James’s legs fly up, kicking — head thrown back — “ _Fuck, fuck, oh… f-fuck…”_

As James squirts, the pressure around Sirius tightens even harder, and he can’t hold back any longer — all he can do is make sure in his last grasp on sanity that he’s gotten it all down on his memory, the sight of it, the smell, the feel of it.

And finally he comes, groaning James’s name into his soft neck — he comes under the touch of James brushing, petting his hair — he comes, into warmth, warmth, warmth, and brightness, and oak-mahogany-amber-brown eyes.


	4. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> JAMES POV
> 
> Short final chapter. Fluff. SFW.

**Epilogue**

Sirius loves him.

James doesn’t have any qualms about _that —_ Sirius had _said_ it and all, and why would he lie about it? But if Sirius loves him the same way, he doesn’t show it like James does. And when James doesn’t get all the signals, it’s hard to read only the few that do feed into his brain and then sort them out like one of those algebra puzzles that he’d had to figure out when Sirius went missing.

Sirius yawns over the omelet sizzling in the pan. If James could cook, he’d take over — Sirius looks so exhausted, brown under his eyes from yet another near-all-nighter espionage shift for the Order. It isn’t like he can get all the rest he would want, either; there will be an all-Gryffindor graduates gathering at the castle later today and they sure as hell aren’t going to miss _that._ If James’s impression of Gryffindor after seven years of being part of it is at all accurate, the party is bound to stretch into the night and presumably the morning after, and that was going to be when Sirius sacrificed his last few winks of sleep and would probably die.

James thinks Sirius deserves to die in a more glorious way, if he were to die at all — everything from the way he carries himself that contests James’s presumed “arrogance,” to the way he casually flips the omelet with the same wand that he uses to duel sometimes four to five full-time Death Eaters at once, suggests he must have at least some level of immortality insured in his blood — and James is about to say so, in what will be a failed attempt to persuade Sirius to _kick the party, it will happen again in the near future anyway_ (people were gathering all the time nowadays, afraid that each time will be the last). But Sirius at that moment serves James’s omelet on a plate and lets it drift on air to where James is sitting, crossed-legged on the high kitchen counter.

“Merlin,” Sirius mutters, now poking his wand at the coffee machine. “Remind me again, why did we even bother to get this _thing_?” He says _thing_ like he can’t bear to describe it in words any more descriptive.

James vocalizes something that should sound like a shrug, verbalized, around a mouth stuffed with fluffs of egg. The machine sits still and un-dripping, not even making the half-hearted whirring noise it usually does.

“Homenum Revelio!” Sirius says enthusiastically.

“When ‘re ‘ou — urrngh —“ James gulps a mouthful — “going to realize magic just doesn’t _work_ on Muggle stuff?”

“Yeah? What do you call the time when we sprouted a pig’s tail on the behind of that loopy Muggle boy who tried to steal your wand?” The coffee machine bursts into a small campfire. Sirius swears above the crackling noise that’s way too loud for the mostly-still-asleep neighborhood, and hoses water out of his wand.

James gives out a frustrated noise. “Blimey, he wasn’t a _machine,_ Si, he was a human… A human _kid,_ may I add, and _you_ did that to him, not _us._ He didn’t even know it _was_ a wand. He probably thought it was a toy.”

“Yeah, but it _was_ a wand, and if he’d really nicked it when I hadn’t intervened, the Death Eaters would have really killed him the moment they appeared on that — what’s-it-called, Pirouette Drive.”

“Private Drive?”

“Ridiculous name, regardless.” Sirius says, patting down his burnt fizzle of a fringe and showering soot down himself, including his own untouched omelet that is also probably cold by now.

James’s first thought is that Sirius looks in these pathetic moments the most like the dog he really is, and proceeds to scratch that thought out when it conflicts with thought number two: that Sirius’s dry way he talks about Muggles but defends them with his own life day after day regardless is kind of intriguing, not entirely in a non-sexual way, as well as thought number three: James is horny.

Sirius regards him with an indifferent face when James abandons his half-eaten meal on the counter, approaching him and wrapping his hands around Sirius’s warm neck. James lifts an expectant chin.

“James, not _today,_ for Merlin’s sake, you know I’m spent,” Sirius says, although his pupils do look a bit round, drooping himself slightly to bury a once-only kiss on the top of James’s head.

If Sirius still had slight trouble expressing his undying love for James openly, and if he was “spent” from time to time, it was all fine.

James locks himself in the bathroom, jerks one off, and doesn’t leave until all traces of saggy war-weariness in his reflection are tucked under _The Magician’s Solution (for Diligent Wizards, Heavy Duty)_ concealer. He grins; his teeth shine white, his hair explodes in full vigor.

Sirius waits for him by the door and, with a raised eyebrow and deft fingers, fixes the top button of James’s cloak that happened to be attached one loop too high.

They’re all too welcome in the Gryffindor Common Room, the Fat Lady letting them in with a genuine smile and, for once, without the password (graduate privileges), and James yells at three or four familiar faces in quick succession. Sirius bounds off, raising a hand at the group of girls who hoot at him from the fireplace couches. James smirks internally at the time he used to feel a sting in his stomach whenever such a thing happened back at school, so distinct his muscle memory contracts at it even now. He has to summon his logic to push it down, like smoothing down a piece of parchment that’s been rolled up for too long and too tightly.

The rest of the day blurs into a single, incoherent blob of laughter, drenched in now-legal firewhiskey and maroon-gold banners hung around shoulders and a lukewarm pool of nostalgia that no one admits to but everyone implies. Day fades into gorgeous sunset refracted through stained windows and then into night, and by that time Remus has come in from the day’s mission and emptied a Father Christmas-sized bag of Honeydukes into the air, quite literally. Gryffindors, current and graduated alike, scream and throw their hands as if in some form of bigoted prayer, snatching at the familiar golden-rich chocolates and the fractures of pure happiness to piece together until it looks like a memory.

“I’m whacked,” Sirius announces to no one in particular, stuffing three different candies into his mouth.

Before James can nod at him, ask him if he wants to leave, or even address him in any form, Sirius has left for the staircase — as if he’d forgotten he doesn’t _live_ here anymore.

James doesn’t blame him; it feels as natural as ever to stumble to the nearest couch and collapse, which is exactly what he does himself after twice more full burns of Firewhiskey in his throat.

He drifts, like that, mind a mess of bright color and laughter, imagination bleeding with reality until himself and Sirius are firmly implanted in the center of the hubbub now gathered about the fireplace, rallying, _“Snog! Snog! Snog…”_

“Hey.”

James stirs in his dreamless sleep, the blanket hugging him, sinking him deeper into oblivion…

“Oi, Prongs.”

Said blanket shakes his feet off and snatches his breath away. James opens a reluctant eye.

“Our mission starts in half an hour,” Sirius says sharply. He looks strangely pale, and James can’t tell if the glassiness in his light grey eyes is because he’s slightly less exhausted now or because he’d seen some kind of terrifying hallucination. He dons on his deep-green coat, which James realizes had been the thing acting as his blanket.

“Hello, Professor,” he says, as a black cat steps gracefully out of the portrait tunnel and transforms into McGonnagall.

“Oh, Sirius,” McGonnagall nods at him, then looks at James with a steep eyebrow. James shrugs, hand coming up to pat down his hair.

“Morning, Professor.”

“Just to let you know, Professor,” says Sirius. “There was a boggart in the bathroom of the spare room.”

“Oh,” McGonnagall frowns. “Yes, I shall take care of that…Thank you for letting me know, Sirius. Now, off you go… None of the faculty have mentioned that you could stay the night…”

James is still shaking sleep out of his head as they floo home into their make-shift fireplace. Sirius shrugs out of his cloak and Leviosa’s it to the peg. _No ‘Slept well?’,_ thinks James. _No ‘That was fun, wasn’t it?’ Not so much of a ‘Morning.’_

James wanders to the kitchen, mind floating a mile away… His hands land on a couple of oranges and bananas — he tugs one of them open with his teeth as his fingers skitter to the coffee machine, feeling their way to the switches and all but forgetting they don’t work anymore until some leftover magic singes a fingertip.

He hisses.

Something tugs at his stomach — he’s pulled back, stumbling, landing on toes, and Sirius overwhelms him, his smell, presence, the small utterance of “ _James._ ”

“ _What?_ ” James says, now properly confused. He tries to shift, assessing that having half of his weight leaning backward is quite uncomfortable, and finds that there’s no give. Sirius’s arms go tighter around his middle, his forehead presses harder against the top of his head and rubs into his hair.

“I thought you were too ‘spent’ for sex,” James points out.

“I don’t… I…” Sirius trails off, in one of the rare occasions in which he takes time to find words. “Can I just hold you?” he ends softly, a cold nose brushing James’s ear.

“I…” James turns to look back, but Sirius’s head is stubborn in blocking him. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess.”

James hears him breathe behind him, feels dampness meet and cling to the back of his neck, one long exhale, a pause, then followed by yet another longer one.

“Saw you,” Sirius whispers. James tries not to shiver. _No sex. No sex. No sex._ “The boggart.”

Forget sex, James’s mind goes blank.

The _boggart…_

“Oh,” he says. “Me…what?”

“Dying. Dead. Tortured.”

Each word cuts into James’s chest like daggers, the thought of Sirius seeing _James_ like that, being so haunted that he has to hold him afterwards just to remind himself they’re both still _alive —_ James swallows, and in a place where stone-cold horror should pour into, a fuzzy warmth fills instead.

Sirius’s head drops onto his shoulder, heavy and stubborn, and he starts to sway him sideways until they rock together like the only two people on a boat.

“I love you.”

“Yeah,” James whispers faintly, fingers seeking for purchase between Sirius’s. “Yeah, me too.”

“I just thought you should know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a lovely time. Thanks a lot. As always, would love some reviews!


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